"Unjust" aspects of capitalism

[Gabu]

I think one of the biggest is when people no more skilled or talented than anyone else get a much richer and fuller life purely because their parents could afford more things.  The only problem is that there is no easy way to fix to this issue; the obvious solution (just disallowing them from having that money) would cause many more problems than it would solve, and the less obvious solutions (such as educational affirmative action based on economic status) are deceptively hard to get right such that they don't cause other problems.

[Gabu]

NOTA-they don't exist.

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I'm not 100% sure how this can be asserted, unless you have a very different definition of "just" than I do.  To give another example aside from what I stated above, in pure capitalism, lying for the purposes of getting others' money would be a perfectly legitimate exercise.  In other words, a scam artist who cons, say, 50 people out of $50,000 each, would get off completely scot free.  The only way that the conned people could get their money back would be to either con the scam artist back, to somehow get the scam artist to give the money back in exchange for something else, or to murder the scam artist and forcefully take the money back.  Either way, even though 99% of people are obviously not scam artists, one can imagine how distrustful people would be of everyone else in this atmosphere, given how suspicious people are even now, when scam artists run an illegal business that can be punished when discovered.  I can't imagine how any of this could be perceived as "just".

If you want another example, in pure capitalism, there would be no such thing as the thirteenth amendment - the buying and selling of people as property would be perfectly fine.  Now, of course, it could be argued that the free market would sort this out because people would recognize that it's not in their best financial interest to keep these people in captivity, but the issue is that, as I have argued before, the free market is not some magical entity: it is the combination of the interests and of the minds of the people within it.  If enough people act in a obliviously irrational manner within a free market, then to say that the free market will fix the problem is akin to saying that a crazy person will recognize his own insanity and will then pursue methods to cure it - something that might happen, but something that most people would not exactly like to place most of their bets on.  Either way, it did happen for quite a while in a capitalistic setting until regulations were put into place, and I don't see how this could be perceived as "just", either.

I suppose all of it could be explained away by simply making the definition of "just" coincide with the definition of what is to occur in a capitalistic setting (namely, in the most general terms, that people are able to trade something to get something else), but that would be an awfully strange definition of "just".

Note that none of this is arguing against capitalism or trying to say that its alternatives would be better.  I just don't deify capitalism as some people seem to do.